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Saturday, 25 August 2012

Know If Strangers Can See Your Facebook Photos

If you have uploaded some private photos on Facebook thinking that only friends can view those photos, here’s something you should know.

If you have uploaded some private photos on Facebook thinking that only friends can view those photos, here’s something you should know (and check).

Some of your photo albums on Facebook may even be visible to people who aren’t connected to you on Facebook. For instance, I am no friend of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg but I can still see some of his photo albums on Facebook though they aren’t immediately visible on his profile page at facebook.com/wikiboogle.

How Your Facebook Photo Albums Become Visible to Strangers

This 60-seconds long video screen cast demonstrates how your personal photos on Facebook can become visible to strangers.

Step 1. Log in to your Facebook account and open the profile page of any Facebook user whose pictures you want to see. Alternatively, you may use the search feature in Facebook to directly open the profile of any person.

Step 2. Copy the following line of code to the clipboard and then paste it into the address bar of your web browser where that Facebook page is open.

If that person has previously shared any of her photo albums or profile pictures on Facebook using the default privacy settings, their albums might show up on your screen as well.

The photo albums won’t appear on their regular Facebook profile page but as soon as you copy-paste that simple code, the results might sometimes surprise you.

What’s the fix?

To make sure that none of your Facebook photo albums are visible to strangers, create a dummy account on Facebook, open your profile page and then copy-paste the same code. If you see the following message, consider yourself safe:

There are no photos to display. Photos of may not have been tagged, or may not be visible due to privacy.

To prevent your Facebook pictures from showing up on the screens of strangers, go to this page – facebook.com/privacy – and set the privacy option of every photo album, that you want to hide from the world, to either “Only Friends” or a select group.

The default privacy setting, when you create a new photo album, is “everyone” – most people don’t change the defaults and that’s why their photos can get exposed through the above JavaScript hack.